Dead Is The New Black

“Too bad, babe.” In her ice-green eyes I saw a glimmer of something that looked like disappointment. She held out my bag of blood. “I’m outta here.”

“So am I,” I said, glancing defiantly in Megan’s direction. “You want to hit an after-hours club together, maybe see if we can find a couple of interesting guys? Or in your case, girl,” I amended.

“I thought I had,” Brooklyn said. “Looks like I was wrong. Stay out of the sunlight, Mata Hari.” She turned to go, but then she hesitated. “I sometimes wonder why I got vamped, you know? Like why me, a nice Jewish girl who was good to her Bubbe, kind to small children, only bought lattes made from fair-trade coffee beans? Hell, I’ve got a sister, too—a twin, and except that she’s straight the two of us could be clones. Yet I got turned and Xandra didn’t. I haven’t figured it out yet.” She shrugged. “But if life’s supposed to be more than just a series of random shitstorms, maybe the reason why you received this fun bonus from fate is because being a vamp is your only chance of becoming a real person. I really hope that happens for you, babe. Vamp or not, the little I saw of who you could be was a hell of a lot more intriguing than the bratty younger sister of the Daughter and the Healer.”

In my own defence, I’d like to point out that it had been a long night, what with chickening out of killing myself, playing tug-of-rat with a cat and nearly getting bitten by Stud-Tongue. Not to mention receiving a wicked uppercut to my jaw from my new best friend, finding and losing the man of my fantasies and having my sisters discover I’d progressed to drinking blood. All in all, I wasn’t in the mood to thank Brook for her assessment of me and thoughtfully ask myself if any of what she’d said could be true. I was more in the mood to yell the meanest things I could think of at her as she walked away from me.

Which is what I did, and to this day I wish I could call back the words I flung after her.

“You mean I won’t have to think of a polite way to tell you I don’t appreciate being pawed on the slightest pretext by another woman, babe?” I gave a short laugh. “News flash, Punk-girl—that’s not a tragedy, that’s a relief! Even if I were gay, you’re so not my type, with that dark-root look you’ve got going with your hair and that Salvation Army look you’ve got going with your clothes!” I raised my voice as she slipped into the shadows between two buildings and disappeared from my view without ever having looked back. “And another thing—”

Something brushed against my hair and fell to my shoulders. Startled, I looked down at myself and saw the starry shapes of small, white flowers against the black of my trenchcoat. Then the nausea hit me, ten times more powerfully than it had in reaction to old man Schneider’s garlic breath, and I realized what the flowers were.

“Wild garlic!” I choked the words out as I fell to my knees. “Get it off me!”

“Is unfortunate necessity, Granddaughter.” As the Russian-accented words reached my ears, my blurred vision made out the bulky shape of a caped figure reeling in the excess length of his wild-garlic lasso as he approached me. “Do not worry, this is not trap to stake you,” he said with hearty reassurance.

“Tha’s…good to know…” I mumbled as I pitched face-forward onto the ground and lost consciousness at Darkheart’s feet.

“It’s worse than we thought.” As I struggled upward through the fog surrounding me, I heard Kat’s worried voice coming from a long way away. “She keeps her shoes in a plastic garbage bag—Manolos, Jimmy Choos, all jumbled up together in a big pile! How could she?”

“What more proof do we need that she’s totally deteriorated? And if you think that’s bad, take a look at what I found under her bed, covered with dust bunnies.” Megan didn’t sound worried, she sounded pissed off. “My cream Chanel jacket, the one she swore she hadn’t borrowed.”

“Refrigerator is disaster area. Bag of stale doughnuts, two cartons take-out Chinese food, old slices pizza. In cupboards are cookies and candy bars.” The fog around me lifted enough for me to hear Darkheart sigh heavily. “Is typical symptom. She fights blood hunger but other cravings come upon her.”

They’d brought me to my own apartment, I realized, and while I’d been dead to the world my sisters and my grandfather—I couldn’t hear Mikhail or Jack, so I assumed they’d been left on patrol—had been searching the place. Outrage flickered in me but I still felt too lethargic to move.

“You mean she gets the munchies?” Kat’s tone went from worried to appalled. “The poor sweetie, she’s going to blimp out if she keeps this up. Honestly, Meg, if I can’t attempt a Heal on my own sister—”

Her words were like an icy wind blowing the last of my grogginess away. I sat bolt upright, realizing as I did that I was no longer bound by Darkheart’s garlic lasso, and the next moment I was racing across the room to the window that looked out onto the metal fire escape. I was steps away from it when I saw the wreath tacked to the sill, its starry white flowers wafting their deadly scent toward me. I changed direction in mid-dash and made for the door, only to see another garlic wreath festooning that escape route. Blindly I headed for my bedroom. The window by my bed didn’t open onto a handy fire escape, it looked out over the Dumpster that had been the scene of my embarrassing tussle with Bojangles, but although I hadn’t been able to bring myself to jump from St. Jude’s bell tower earlier this evening I thought I could manage a three-story drop into a pile of reeking refuse.

Given what the alternative was.

I came to a screeching halt. Megan was standing in the bedroom doorway, her stake in her hand. “You wouldn’t, Meg,” I said hollowly.

She looked thoughtful. “Probably not, brat. But do you really want to find out?”

“Sweetie, calm down.” I spun around to see Kat advancing on me, her perfect features shadowed with compassion. “As Darkheart said, we’re not planning a staking. This little get-together’s more along the lines of a—”

“Stay away from me, Kat!” I hissed, shrinking from her. In chagrin I realized my fangs were lengthening, and I tried to keep my top lip immobile—a look that might have worked for Humphrey Bogart, but which I was pretty sure wasn’t working for me. “I know what this is! It’s an intervention, and you can forget it—I’m not risking an attempted Heal unless you can guarantee it won’t go bad, sending me straight to hell and eternal damnation. But you can’t guarantee that, can you?”

Kat tossed a swath of silver-blond hair from her shoulders. I could see she was trying to hold on to her I’m-a-Healer-so-I-feel-love-for-all-living-things-even-the-undead serenity and fighting a sisterly impulse to snap at me. “Merde, sweetie, that’s only happened a handful of times in the whole history of Healing, and when it has it’s usually—”

“It’s usually been when the prospective Healee bears the mark of a Queen Vampyr,” I broke in. “Hmmm…who do we know like that? Oh, that’s right—me!”

I was backing away from her as I spoke, but I froze when I felt something sharp in my back, just below my left shoulderblade. I kept my gaze straight ahead. “Stake?”

“Yup,” Megan agreed from behind me. “I told you two she’d make a piss-poor candidate,” she said laconically to Darkheart and Kat. “Face it, Kat, we’ve always known our little sister’s got a few tiny character flaws, starting with being spoiled, self-involved and immature. Even her punky vamp friend’s figured her out. I say we drop this ridiculous plan.”

Her character assassination of me aside, I told myself, Megan was arguing my case for me. I should probably keep my mouth shut. Ignoring my own advice, I turned around and glared at her. “Ever since you’ve taken on the role of a Daughter of Lilith you’ve been a royal pain in the butt, Meg. You’re the self-involved one!”

“Really?” she said thinly. “Tell me, when you did your midnight flit from the Crosse mansion last week after we got that letter from Cyrus Kane, did it occur to you that we’d be worried sick when we found you gone? We wasted three patrol nights tracking you down to this crappy apartment and when we did I wanted to read you the riot act for scaring us the way you did, but Darkheart—” she nodded at Grandfather, who remained silent “—insisted we give you time to adjust to the realization that you were the one Zena marked when we were babies.”

“Of all the ingratitude!” I sputtered. “You’re on my case because I left home before I—” I stopped abruptly and Megan’s gaze narrowed.

“Before you what?”

Before I killed you and Kat, I told her silently. Before I slaughtered Darkheart and Mikhail and Jack. Before the hunger became stronger than I could handle, the way it almost did tonight. Once upon a time I would have blurted out the truth to her, I thought, taking in the firm line of her mouth, the hard steadiness that hadn’t been in her gaze before she’d become a Daughter. But now I couldn’t know for sure if she’d react to my confession as a sister…or as the sworn enemy of me and my kind.

“Before I went out of my mind with boredom,” I said with a shrug. “I mean, things around here are getting so same old, same old. First Zena shows up in Maplesburg and you stake her, then Kane shows up and Kat Heals him—and by the way, Kat,” I added in an aside, “Cyrus fleeing to the ends of the earth all tortured with guilt over his evil past and dying in a Buddhist monastery isn’t the most reassuring demonstration of the benefits of a Heal. No wonder you don’t have vamps lining up to take advantage of the oh-so-special gift you inherited from Daddy Dearest.”

“Firstly, Kane didn’t die from being Healed, he was murdered,” Kat said sharply. “And the vamp that infiltrated the monastery and killed him was the same one he tried to warn us about in the letter the monks forwarded to us after his death—Lady Jasmine Melrose, the bitch who turned him centuries ago right here in Maplesburg. Secondly, what’s with the ‘Daddy Dearest’ merde? Finding out that there’s a possibility our father didn’t die twenty years ago when Zena targeted Angelica should have made you as happy as it did Megan and me, but ever since we read that postscript to Kane’s letter—”

“‘David Crosse lives’,” I quoted impatiently. “And it wasn’t Kane’s postscript, it was tacked onto the end of his letter by Jasmine, along with her heads-up to us about how she’s coming to Maplesburg. But she hasn’t shown up here, has she? And if her news-flash about Daddy Dearest was true, why hasn’t he contacted us in all these years?”

“That’s what Gospodin Darkheart has requested me to find out. My family’s business contacts in former Soviet Socialist Republic have spent past week questioning peasants in mountainous Carpathian region in attempt to learn what happened to David Crosse after night when Zena left him for dead. Trail is understandably cold after so long and so far is few results, but still is hope we will learn something.”

The unfamiliar voice came from behind me, and I turned in quick alarm to see a man standing in the open doorway of my apartment. Under other circumstances I might have let my gaze linger on him, but right now—well, okay, maybe I did let my gaze linger. Not for long, but enough to make a snap assessment of the man’s attributes, which included about six foot five inches of tanned, hard-muscled male dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, close-cropped hair even paler than Kat’s platinum shade and icy blue eyes that ignored everyone else in the room and remained fixed on me. He looked to be around twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and from his accent it wasn’t hard to guess he was one of the Russians living in New York that Mikhail had called on during our final battle against Cyrus Kane and his vamp army.

All of which didn’t explain what he was doing in my apartment and why he seemed to be more in the loop than I was when it came to my family’s private business.

One of Grammie’s most cherished dictums is that one should always be polite and considerate to guests. Grammie’d never had a massive blond know-it-all Russian dropped on her from out of the blue, I thought wrathfully as I turned on Megan and Kat. “Who’s he?” I demanded, jerking my thumb at the Russian. “And what does he mean, his family’s been looking into David Crosse’s whereabouts? Is Darkheart & Crosse running investigations I don’t know about now?”

“Name is Dmitri Malkovich,” the blond giant said before my sisters could answer. “Search for Gospodin Crosse is not official agency business. Is undertaken by my family in attempt to repay your grandfather for great service he has done us in old country when he saved my sister Anya from vampyr attack. Cousins in Mother Russia are mafya, have many contacts and ways to find out things.” He frowned. “How is said mafya in America?”

“Mafia,” Megan said briefly. “And it’s probably wiser to tell people they’re in waste management or something like that.” She turned her attention back to me. “You’ve got no one but yourself to blame for the fact that you’re out of touch with what’s happening at the agency, Tash. You saw what happened to us when we thought we were the ones Zena marked and isolated ourselves, so why are you making the same mistake we did?”

“Maybe because it’s no fun to be around you anymore?” I said, raising my eyebrows at the stake she was still pointing my way. “Gawd, Meg, it’s like you and Kat have forgotten how to have a good time. It’s all staking and Healing and punching the clock at Darkheart & Crosse—is it such a crime to want to party or go shopping once in a while?”

“I party every night, sweetie,” Kat drawled. “As the owner of Maplesburg’s hottest club, that’s part of my job description, no? You could have dropped by the Hot Box anytime, but maybe hanging out in an alleyway is more your idea of fun.”

“Frankly, it is,” I shot back. “You just said it yourself—when you’re at the Hot Box you’re working, not ready to chill with your sis over a couple of cocktails. Besides, I still remember it as it was when Zena owned it. You nearly died there, Kat.”

“Yes, but she didn’t,” Megan said evenly. “Zena did. So forgive me if I don’t buy your sudden sensitivity, Tashya. I think the truth is that you’re having way too much fun cutting loose for the first time in your life and you don’t care that walking away from your family is the price. I guess we should be thankful that you haven’t totally embraced your vamphood.” She paused. “So far,” she added harshly. “I never want to have to hunt you down, sis, so don’t do anything that might make that happen. Let’s leave, Kat. I told you we were wasting our time trying to talk to her.”

I stared at her as she strode to the door, feeling as though she’d just slapped me in the face. Then I looked quickly away, hoping that my blubathon at Kathy Lehman’s had depleted my tear ducts for the evening, and realizing it hadn’t when I felt a sharp prickle behind my eyelids. Strangely enough, it wasn’t Megan’s barely veiled threat of staking me that hurt most, it was her attitude. She was trying her hardest to convince Kat and Darkheart that I wasn’t worth attempting a Heal.

She was trying too hard, I realized a heartbeat later. Even as I wondered why she was in such a hurry to hustle Kat and my grandfather out before the three of them could attempt what they’d obviously come here to do, Darkheart addressed me for the first time since he’d arrived.

“Is much talk of Queen Vampyr among those you meet?” His question was abrupt and his gaze on me was sharp. “Perhaps tonight you hear rumors, da?”

“Sorry, nyet,” I informed him. “I mean, Zena was a big deal to us, sure, but after her death the ordinary Joe Vamp in Maplesburg got on with his undead life.” I remembered Trudy and Cindy. “Her style sense lives on, though. Does that count?”

“Not Zena, the new queen.” Megan turned from the apartment door, her hand slipping from the doorknob. Her voice was low, as if she was reluctant to speak at all. “Lady Jasmine.”

“The Cruel,” added Kat in the same reluctant tone.

I rolled my eyes. “What’s with these queen vamps? Zena billed herself as ‘the Horrible,’ now Jasmine’s calling herself ‘the Cruel’—I mean, talk about shameless self-promotion—”